“If this war is fought to a finish, however, civilization may perish in the holocaust. God grant, then, that it shall be halted in time. But can it be halted while hatred remains in the breasts of men? And if I bear hatred for one man, will not this hatred spread out its roots and grow insidiously into a hatred for all the people of his country?”
Appearing in a few spots on this site are articles from 1937 written by journalists who were all of the mind that the Great Depression had finally reached an end. We all thought this was terribly odd because we all knew that the Depression lingered into 1940. However, this article showed up and explained it all to us: written by a Republican congressman and published in an anti-Roosevelt magazine, the author explained that since 1936, the economy was slowly getting better – and then it all went south during the late summer of 1937, plunging deeper in 1938.
Whether Joan Fontaine (1917 – 1913) was pressured into writing this bitter-sweet article by her studio or some other Hollywood entity – we’ll never know, but this piece recalls her earliest days in Japan, where she was born, and all the sweet smiles and kind words that all of us are peppered with during our formative years. So much for the sweet part of the article – then she recalls her return trip in 1934-35 and what a bunch of Fascist skanks they all turned into (Japanese-Americans also feel her back hand).
Having no idea that The Great I Am had His own plans for the Jews of Europe, numerous heads of government convened to plan a homeland for the Jews – in Latin America.
“A vast plan for resettling thousands of Jews and other refugees in South America currently is being studied in several important Latin American capitals…”
“Now, therefore, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America,…do hereby proclaim that the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was repealed on the 5th day of December, 1933…”
When marathon dancing first became popular in the Twenties there was an amusing, lighthearted aspect to it. However, when the Great Depression came, and the jobs evaporated, marathon dances took a darker turn. As desperation fell across the land, enrolling in a marathon dance contest became, in many cases, the only way to put bread on the table.
For those blessed to live in a society with a free-market economy, we are pleased to pursue our whims daily – and eight times out of ten, they are made manifest before too long. Yet this was not the case for those living on the W.W. II home front. This article is about the black market that must have been a temptation for everyone back then. The reader will get a true sense of the tyranny Americans had to suffer when our economy was engaged in total war; it was written by one of the autocrats charged with enforcing the rationing laws.
The front-line Tommy of the First World War, like Fritz, Jock, Sammy and Les Poilu, had a good deal of time on his hands between terrors. Some wrote letters, some made trench art, some slept – and the ones we’re concentrating on were the ones who made this handy alphabetic guide that explained their world:
“Z is for ZERO, the time we go over,
Most of us wish we were way back
in Dover
Making munitions and living in clover
And far, far away from the trenches”
“Radio Tokyo indicated inadvertently yesterday that out Superfort offensive aimed at the destruction of Japanese war production had attained a considerable measure of success.”
Liberty publisher Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) was a reliable critic of FDR and his economic policies. In this column MacFadden lambasts the President for making error after error and learning from none of them. He points out that the open market economy of the United States has traditionally provided Americans with the world’s highest standard of living, and yet:
“They would like to ignore precedent… entirely cast aside and forget the extraordinary results of our experiences in following the American system. They hate business and everything connected with it.”
In the early Sixties, American church attendance was dropping as a new spirit of secularism was sweeping across the fruited plains. More and more merchants and restaurateurs were opening their businesses on Sundays and challenging the age-old Blue Laws as a result. This article examines what the Bible said about “keeping the sabbath holy”, and why Blue Laws were enacted in so many states.
George Creel (1876 – 1953), the nation’s first and only official censor (1917 – 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:
“No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true.”
By the end of the war, FDR’s administration had placed taxable personal income as high as 94%(!). His Brain Trust were all big believers in Federal intervention into the economy – offering all sorts of price freezes and wage freezes in order to limit competition during the Great depression (as if that was a good). As the war kicked-in to high gear, FDR installed a low ceiling upon all high-earners and capped their salaries at $25,000.00 per-year.
Click here to read about FDR’s airplane.
The Leftists who ran the shop over at New Masses could easily have lived with the muscle-bound posing’s of Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955), but when he grew discontent with mugging it before the cameras and started writing anti-FDR editorials in a popular magazine, they knew they had to shut him down.
“The attack on business so well popularized by the present administration at Washington unquestionably prolonged the Depression, perpetuated the dole, and added millions to the unemployed”
With W.W. II just around the corner, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps’ “subsistence laboratory” in Chicago was burning the mid-night oil trying to create a nutritious light weight ration with little bulk for the nascent paratrooper divisions.
“From the start the naval Construction Battalions were unusual outfits, mostly because of the men in them and because theirs was a new kind of warfare… Every Seabee found himself doubling in various trades. It was thus the construction men developed their most important tools – improvisation, ingenuity and guts. Often parts, materials and equipment had to be manufactured on the spot in shops hastily thrown together from salvaged enemy materials and tools… But as the Seabee organization grew (from an original force of 3,300 to a peak of 247,155, of which 83 percent were overseas) and its activities increased, the battalions picked up plenty of know-how, enabling them to smooth out and speed up operations.”
Here is first-person account of life in an M3 Stuart tank fighting in Tunisia:
“We were ordered to hold, and hold we did. But we took a terrible shellacking. We dodged around, spitting at the Germans with our little 37mm gun. Every now and then one of their heavy tank shells or high-velocity 88s would hit one of our light tanks and smash it. The wounded would crawl out, and those who could walk would carry or drag those who couldn’t… In the afternoon, when we were finally ordered to withdraw, we had only 9 of 18 tanks left, and some of those were damaged. We took what wounded we could into the tanks and held them in our arms.”
